Super Fruit and Veggies! at Howe Library

The Honest Weight Food Co-op outreach team spent Thursday afternoon at the Howe Public Library with 20 very excited kids building sculptures out of fresh fruits and veggies!

Hip Dips at North Albany Library

The Honest Weight Food Co-op outreach team spent the afternoon at the North Albany Library making hip dips as a part of our Ready, Set, Grow! program and community outreach & education efforts. The kids made a Groovy Grasshopper, Creamy dill & chili bean dip with platefuls of fresh colorful veggies. It was a lot of fun!

Making Mexcian Rice at The Troy Art Center Summer Camp

Honest Weight Food Co-op's Outreach Coordinator, Mariah Dahl spent last Monday afternoon at The Troy Art Center's summer camp mixing up a delicious and healthy afternoon snack. The students worked together as a team, cooked Mexican brown rice, real hot chocolate and made el dia de muerte skeletons from dried pasta.

Food for Thought: Taking Root

Food For Thought: An Evening of Socially Relevant Cinema
Taking Root

Thursday May 20th
Reception 6pm
Film 7pm
Discussion follows film
$6 at the door

Co-presented by the Honest Weight Food Co-op and WAMC’s Documentary Film Series, Food For Thought is a monthly evening of food, film and discussion with a focus on films of social, political, environmental and community interest. Held on the third Thursday of each month, the night will feature food samples by Honest Weight Food Co-op, a feature film screening, and an open panel discussion. For more information and ticket sales visit: http://www.wamcarts.org/

About the film: Taking Root: The Vision Of Wangari Maathai is the story of the growth of a woman and the grassroots movement she founded, the Green Belt Movement of Kenya. Together they have transformed their country and our understanding of the integral connections of sustainable development, ecological diversity, human rights, and democracy.

Planting trees for fuel and food is not something that anyone imagined as the first step toward the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet with that simple act, Wangari Maathai started down the path that led her to organize rural Kenyan women in a tree-planting project that reclaimed their land from 100 years of deforestation, restored indigenous agriculture, provided new sources of income, and gave these previously impoverished and powerless women a vital role in their country. They became Kenya's Green Belt Movement: their small organization found itself working successively against ignorance, against prejudice, against embedded economic interests, and political oppression, until they became a national force and in the face of violent government reaction helped to bring down Kenya's dictatorship. The Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 recognized Maathai for her 30-year struggle "to protect the environment, promote democracy, defend human rights, and ensure equality between men and women." In so doing, it also presented to the world a model of personal courage in her determination to follow the links from poverty to development, climate, economics, and democracy.

Guest panelists to include:
Lisa Merton, Director - Lisa started out her career as a weaver. She studied textile design and weaving in Scandinavia and, after returning to the U.S., worked professionally as a weaver for ten years. While studying in Norway she was inspired by a series of tapestries that depicted the occupation of Norway by the Nazis. Her intent was to weave tapestry and use it as an art form for social change but instead she ended up as a production weaver. It was not until she started making films in 1989 that she fulfilled her intent to weave images that could inspire social change. She has a Masters in Teaching English and has taught English as a second language in multi-cultural classrooms. She brings her interest in education, cultural diversity, and social change, as well as her skill as a craftsman, to the filmmaking process.

Hope to see you there!

Film and Reception: Addicted to Plastic

The Honest Weight Food Co-op will be co-sponsoring with the The Sanctuary for Independent Media a reception, screening, and discussion featuring the film








"Addicted to Plastic: The Rise and Demise of a Modern Miracle"

On Saturday, May 15, 2010 beginning at 7 PM. Admission is by donation ($10 suggested, $5 student/low income).

The Sanctuary for Independent Media is located at 3361 6th Avenue in North Troy (at 101st Street); visit www.MediaSanctuary.org, email info@MediaSanctuary.org or phone 518-272-2390 for more information and directions.

From 7-8 PM, there will be an interactive reception to offer everyday alternatives to using plastic. The Honest Weight Food Coop’s "Homemade To Go" demo will give ideas on how to stop buying ready-made food in plastic tubs, and start making your own to-go items. Other local ecological resources and businesses will be charting routes to a less plastic-filled life.

At 8 PM, the film "Addicted to Plastic: The Rise and Demise of a Modern Miracle" will show the history and scope of plastics pollution around the world, and explore solutions. Filmmaker Ian Connacher tells the story of plastic’s ubiquity, having filmed on 5 continents and visited the so-called plastic island floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The documentary presents grim facts, but offers viewers practical steps to address this environmental problem on a personal level.

From styrofoam cups to artificial organs, plastics are perhaps the most ubiquitous and versatile material ever invented. No invention in the past 100 years has had more influence and presence than synthetics. But such progress has had a cost.

For better and for worse, no ecosystem or segment of human activity has escaped the shrink-wrapped grasp of plastic. "Addicted To Plastic" is a global journey to investigate what we really know about the material of a thousand uses and why there's so darn much of it. On the way we discover a toxic legacy, and the men and women dedicated to cleaning it up.

Following the film, local recycling and reuse expert Steve Davis will facilitate a discussion on how to incorporate the film’s information and suggestions into everyday life on a personal level and beyond, at a community level. Davis’ company Ecolibrium helps residential and business customers be sustainable by providing multiple services in the area of reuse, resale and recycling.

Hope to see you there!

Food For Thought: An Evening of Socially Relevant Cinema

HWFC & WAMC present
"The Visitors"
Food for Thought: An Evening of Socially Relevant Cinema

Thursday, April 15th,
6:00 PM reception
7:00 PM film
$6

Co-presented by the Honest Weight Food Co-op and WAMC's Documentary Film Series, Food For Thought is a monthly evening of food, film and discussion with a focus on films of social, political, environmental and community interest. Held on the third Thursday of each month, the night features food samples by Honest Weight Food Co-op, a feature film screening, and an open panel discussion.



About the film: In 1960, approximately 330,000 people were behind bars in USA. Since then, “three strikes” laws and “zero tolerance” policies wiped out many low level offenders. As a result America’s inmate population soared to 2.3 million having an enormous impact on the poor and minorities. There are now 70 prisons in New York State. Although 60 percent of all prisoners in New York State come from New York City, 95 percent of these prisons are located upstate, in remote rural towns and villages, like Attica, Dannemora, and Malone. Every Friday night about 800 people, mostly women and children, almost all of them African American and Latino, gather at Columbus Circle in Manhattan and board buses for the north. Depending on the destination, the whole visiting trip can take up to 25 hours. Most of the passengers make this trip every weekend for many years and in some cases decades.


The Visitors represent a unique and an under served community with common problems, joy and endeavors that has given birth to a subculture with habits, experience, dreams – and even a language – characteristics to themselves.


Guest panelists:
Dennis Mosley - Is a long-time community activist who has worked professionally and voluntarily promoting alternative sentencing and restorative justice models. Dennis also has a passion for the arts and independent film. In 2002, Dennis was a partner in Roots 2 Reels, a project dedicated to works by and about people of color and their allies. This endeavor brought four films to Albany Law School, including Litany for Survival about legendary poet Audre Lorde. The film series also brought the Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker, Jonathan Stack (The Farm: Angola) to Albany to discuss his work. In 2003, Dennis partnered with other film enthusiasts to begin the Albany Independent Film Forum, a film series at the Albany Public Library. Two of the featured films of Albany Independent Film Forum that included discussions with the filmmakers were Big Pun: Still Not a Player, the raw and painful story of Christopher Rios, aka BIG PUNISHER, the first Latino hip-hop artist to go platinum, and Love and Diane, an unsentimental look into the lives of a family mired in the social welfare system.

Originally from the town of Hempstead on Long Island, Dennis has spent most of past thirty years in Albany, where he takes pride in raising his 10-year old daughter, Sierra.


Alison Coleman - Director and founder, created Prison Families of New York, Inc. as a response to her husband going to prison for 25 years to life for a non-violent crime. Incorporated in 1987, PFNY has developed from providing direct client services on a local basis to statewide organizing, policy advisement and advocacy on prison family and re-entry issues. During these years, Alison also worked for The Osborne Association in Brooklyn, NY running the first and only hotline in the nation for prison families. She has raised 2 children, worked with her husband, who was released in October, 2005, to keep their marriage and family intact, provides information and inspiration to prison families across the country and training (often with Jay and their daughter, Cecily), technical assistance and policy development to agencies, advocacy groups statewide and NYS government.


Judith Brink - Judith moved to Albany in 1999 to study at Albany Medical Center's Clinical Pastoral Care program, where a call to the hospital's Secure Unit late one night brought her face to face with an incarcerated young man and a system that seemed all wrong. For the past 5 years she has been the Director of Prison Action Network, a criminal justice and prison reform organization, She has been a promoter of The Visitors documentary since she first met the filmmaker in 2006, and presented a "rough cut" at Family Empowerment Day 3 in Albany in 2007, and a "next to a final edit" at Family Empowerment Day 4 in NYC in 2008. Many of those who attended those events had been visitors and some of them even appear in tonight's film. She dedicates her reform efforts to the memory of Ricky Philbert, the incarcerated man she met at Albany Med., who taught her that not everyone in prison belonged there, and that her true calling was in the struggle to correct the system. Visit http://prisonaction.blogspot.com for updates on issues of incarceration.


Charles LaCourt - Born and raised in the public housing projects of Spanish Harlem in New York City. Despite a loving family and catholic school education he became immersed into the hard core criminal lifestyle of New York City – selling drugs, robberies and a chronic heroin-cocaine addiction. This 28 year experience resulted in numerous arrests, four felony convictions for selling drugs and robbery; and three state prison sentences.

Since 1996 Charles has been drug free and crime free; he is a community activist in the city of Albany who works with youth, the formerly incarcerated and community empowerment.

Charles has been program manager for the AIDS Council of Northeastern New York’s Intensive Case Management Program, facilitated a father’s educational support group at Albany County Bright Beginnings Program, served as coordinator for the Center for Law and Justice’s Prevention and Empowerment Program (PREP) and been a clinical supervisor for Adolescent Employability Skills Program in Albany.

A recipient of the 2006 Phoenix Award from the NYS Hispanic Heritage Month Committee and the WFP 2007 Community Activist of the Year he co-founded ROOTS (Reentry Opportunities and Orientations Towards Success) which assists formerly incarcerated men and women to make a positive reentry back into their communities.

He is currently a Community Prosecution Coordinator at the Albany County District Attorney’s Office and sits on the NYS Reentry Advisory Group.


Info: http://www.wamcarts.org/artsched.html

The Linda, WAMC's Performing Arts Studio 339 Central Ave, Albany, NY

Yummmmy! Creamy Dill Dip

This Wednesday, April 14th the Honest Weight Food co-op's Outreach Team will be at the College of St. Rose's health fair sampling homemade creamy dill dip with carrots and broccoli.

The recipe is very easy and fun to do with kids or as a fast appetizer for your next potluck dinner.

*My favorite is substituting mayonnaise for vegenaise. If you or your family is lactose intolerant, you can also substitute plain yogurt with soy yogurt.

*Dips are a fun way to get kids excited about eating raw veggies!

*If you are working with younger kids you can also have them cut the dill or scallions with clean craft style scissors instead of using knifes.